"The companion to Rex Ogle's award-winning Free Lunch is a searing account of adolescence in a household torn by domestic violence. Punching Bag is the compelling true story of a high school career defined by poverty and punctuated by outbreaks of domestic abuse. Rex Ogle, who brilliantly mapped his experience of hunger in Free Lunch, here describes his struggle to survive; reflects on his complex, often paradoxical relationship with his passionate,...

Maggie has spent basically every summer of her fifteen-year-old life at the one-hundred-year-old Camp Bellflower for Girls, set deep in the heart of Appalachia. She's from Atlanta, she's never kissed a guy, she's into Backstreet Boys, and her long summer days are full of a pleasant, peaceful nothing-until one confounding moment. A split-second of innocent physical contact pulls Maggie into a gut-twisting love for an older, wiser, and, most surprising...

"Come Back is a testament to the power of the love between a mother and a daughter." - New York Times Book Review "Best mother-daughter memoir." - Glamour "We strongly recommend this powerful mother-daughter memoir...Intense, shocking, and ultimately triumphant..." - Barnes & Noble "A nightmarish saga of a teenage runaway in L.A. ends triumphantly. . . . Heart-wrenching, honest dialogue." - Publishers Weekly "A powerful and moving story of two...

"When Laura Trujillo's mother jumps off a ledge in the Grand Canyon and falls to her death, Laura sets out to discover what drove her mother's actions, and begins to explore the painful secrets they shared. As a young girl, Laura was happy that her mother, divorced and remarried, seemed happy again, and so she hides it when her stepfather begins to abuse her. Now grown up with a family of her own, after her mother dies, Laura goes in search of the...

"A dark romance evolves between a high schooler and her English teacher, in this breathtakingly powerful memoir about a young woman who must learn to rewrite her own story. "Have you ever read Lolita?" So begins seventeen-year-old Alisson's metamorphosis from student to lover and then victim. A lonely and vulnerable high school senior, Alisson finds solace only in her writing-and in a young, charismatic English teacher, Mr. North. He praises her as...

"An actress and producer who suffered from crippling, undiagnosed depression in her teens recounts her harrowing experience of psychological manipulation and abuse at a "therapeutic" boarding school where every moment was a test of survival, and shares how she was able to heal in the aftermath." --

"Launching a propulsive middle grade nonfiction series, a young woman shares her harrowing experience of being wrongly accused of terrorism. Adama Bah grew up in East Harlem after immigrating from Conakry, Guinea, and was deeply connected to her community and the people who lived there. But as a thirteen-year-old after the events of September 11, 2001, she began experiencing discrimination and dehumanization as prejudice toward Muslim people grew....

Martin Moran's family lived in a Denver neighborhood, but what seemed most central, most important, was that they belonged to Christ the King--the church and school up the hill. And what Martin learned, as a good Catholic boy, was that the Hereafter was what counted; the here--fickle and unreliable--was the problem. Martin's world changed abruptly when, at the age of twelve, a church-camp counselor seduced him. In his memoir Moran takes us deep into...

"When Christian singer and speaker Staci Frenes learned her teenage daughter was gay, she found her dreams for the future--along with her lifelong faith--collapsing around her. Coming to terms with a new reality was a challenge--and an invitation--to make room for many things along the way: the inevitability of uncertainty, hope in the midst of loss, awkward and tough conversations, an expanding faith, and a greater understanding of how people are...